I was wondering if anyone had any kind of experience on upgrading the all the HDD's on a P4300 and/or P4300G2 from 300GB 15K SAS to lets say 600GB 15K SAS. The problem at hand is that usually HP recommends buying another controller to add to the cluster when you are running out of space; but we do not have that much physical space anymore, so I was wondering if you can just bring one of our 3 nodes down and upgrade the HDD to a bigger capacity and let re-sync again?

Keep in mind that while your growing space by doing this your not growing IOPS/Performance. As you continue to grow be mindful that you now have half the IOPS/GB density of before and you may have another wall to hit.

Oh did not know that would break the support agreement but the main reason is encryption. I have not found HP HDD drives with SED (self encrypting drive) technology. Was looking into Seagate Cheetah drives the "Instant secure erase technology" is what I was really interested in.

Oh did not know that would break the support agreement but the main reason is encryption. I have not found HP HDD drives with SED (self encrypting drive) technology. Was looking into Seagate Cheetah drives the "Instant secure erase technology" is what I was really interested in.

1st Post

Hi.

I do not think that what you suggest is going to work. It might possibly work if you do what Sean suggests, upgrade them all, not just one. I don't know if that will work, if it does that will be awesome - perhaps someone has done this and can confirm?

What follows may be wrong, if so please correct me. HP's answer to upgrading is to add another node. The cluster requires the same size and speed of drives when adding a node. You can add a node with bigger disks and different speeds but the performance of the cluster will be reduced to the speed of the slowest member. Since you are not changing the speed that won't be a problem but here is the kicker, the extra capacity will not be usable in your cluster since the max size is defined by the smallest disk in the cluster...

The P4300/4500 solutions may have a low entry price but the cost per GB of expansion is immense, bordering on insane. I have done several calculations about this and all reveal similar results. HP sure got it right there, "Pay as you grow", and pay you shall! Upgrading this product is ridiculous. This is mostly due to the high RAID penalties and infrastructure costs.

If you need a SAN solution that will grow beyond a handful of TB then I strongly suggest you look at other technologies. Upgrading your P4300 to its max is going to cost you a fortune and will give you very little TB for your $. I'm not even touching on the investment you will need in 10GBe ports.....It all really comes down to cost per GB.
The system you have was designed for performance and perhaps availability but not for high capacity. Rather spend a little more now and save a whole lot later.

I have worked with several storage technologies and the one I'm most keen on at the moment is the IBM V7000U. Its a great mid market product, easy to use and feature rich (far too much to discuss here). It can deliver iSCSI and FC. The price is not bad and upgrading it will give you plenty, PLENTY more TB for your $. It scales well too. I suggest you take a look at that or actually anything else for that matter before wasting your budget on upgrading the P4300. I have customers facing the exact same issue.

Now, if someone can advise on upgrading the internal disks of existing P4300 nodes, that would make a very big difference....

I just did this today with a standalone node that I was prepping to add in to an existing cluster. Kind of a PITA, but it definitely worked. I don't know if it's different on later units, but on mine the SAN/IQ software is on the physical drives, not on any sort of embedded storage. That being said, I replaced one disk at a time, and let it rebuild between changes. Next, had to reboot to a SmartStart disc to get into the ACU, so I could extend the logical drive. After rebooting again, the hardware was all being reported correctly, but SAN/IQ was still showing the old capacity. To get it to change, I had to change the node's RAID level to 1+0 and back to 5 in the CMC. Now everything looks as if it was a 3.6TB node to begin with, instead of a 2.4 TB node. 50% storage capacity increase for about $750 per node, using genuine drives? Yes, please!